Daddy's Fake Bride (A Fake Marriage Romance) Page 20

  “Long story short—there’s a woman I’m involved with. It’s because of that.”

  “What, your wife on that shitty show?” Ricardo snorted with laughter.

  “Not her. Another woman.”

  “Jeez, you sure get around. Anyway, go on, man.”

  I hesitated. I couldn’t give him the full story. That would take ages. But I still needed a valid reason to make him hack into country records for me, if he could even pull that off.

  “She had a son,” I finally began, going for the sympathy tactic. “He died a couple of years back. She’s obviously still pretty messed up about it, but she never talks about it, and so far I’ve gotten the impression that there’s something really dark about it that she just doesn’t want to talk about in particular. I don’t know how to support her if I don’t know what happened. I’m wondering if perhaps her son was murdered, and I was hoping you could help me find out by looking up death records and such.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally Ricardo spoke up again. “I’ll try for you, Dec. But it could take a while. Call me back in about twenty minutes and I’ll let you know how it’s going.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Which county is it?”

  “Monterey in California.”

  “All right. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  The next few minutes dragged by like thick molasses being poured out of a tin. I finally couldn’t wait any longer and called Ricardo back at the nineteen minute mark.

  “Got anything?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I actually tried calling you back, but your cell is off.”

  “We aren’t allowed phones or laptops on the show,” I explained. “Anyway, you’re saying you got in?”

  “Yep,” he said proudly. “I can see death records, autopsy results, the lot. What’s the name of the kid?”

  “Callum Esposito.”

  “Gimme a minute.”

  I heard him put the phone down with a clatter, and I could hear furious typing in the background. “Got it,” he said, picking up the phone again a minute later. “Kid was fifteen, yeah? Died in 2015?”

  “Yep, that’s the one.”

  “He died at home. It was sudden, and he was very young, so an autopsy was conducted. Concluded to be natural causes.”

  “You sure?”

  “Says it right here. Nothing suspicious was found on or around the body. No bullet holes, knife wounds, needle punctures, and so on. Nothing like that. He died of heart failure.”

  I sighed. “I suppose there’s no way to fake that, is there? Like some sort of poison that could stop the heart?”

  “What, are you writing a fucking crime novel or something?” Ricardo asked with another snort. “No, I don’t think so. You can’t fool a coroner easily. They check every inch of the body, inside and out. The only poisons that can give a false ‘natural causes’ result need to be injected, and that would leave a needle puncture mark, which the coroner would find. Kinda like that crazy dude back in the 90’s. That’s how I know about this shit; from watching a documentary about him once. He nearly got away with it, too.”

  “Which crazy dude?”

  “He was a nurse at a hospital. Killed a bunch of patients with something. Er…fuck, I can’t remember the name of the stuff he injected into them. But it’s used in anesthetics in hospitals.”

  My own damn heart nearly failed when I heard that. “Did you say anesthetics?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “No reason. Thanks for your help, Ric. I’ve gotta go.”

  “No worries.”

  I hung up the phone, my heart pounding. None of this could just be a coincidence anymore. When he was alive, Ellen’s ex-husband owned a private hospital where he worked as an anesthesiologist (on top of running the other family businesses). I knew that because Liv told me on our filmed restaurant date. So Ellen could’ve probably had sneaky access to certain drugs if she wanted.

  I moved her computer mouse on the desk so her computer would wake up. She hadn’t bothered password-protecting it, since she usually locked her office door anyway, so I was easily able to get on and open a browser tab. As soon as I had Google up, I did some searches for the case Ricardo had just mentioned.

  It wasn’t long till I found it. The nurse he’d spoken of had apparently killed five patients back in the 1990’s using a drug called suxamethonium chloride, or ‘sux’ for short. Apparently it was usually used in anesthetics in small doses to cause temporary paralysis, but in large doses it would kill someone within a few minutes. The reason a few killers had used it in the past was because the drug was untraceable, leading a coroner to rule it as a natural death via heart failure or something similar. Theoretically untraceable, anyway. The drug was metabolized so quickly that by the time an autopsy was conducted, the drug had broken down and was unable to be found on a tox screen.

  However, there was one way it could be found, and that’s how they caught the crazy nurse back in the 90’s. Because recent needle marks were found on the dead patients’ bodies, the doctor performing the autopsy knew they must’ve been injected with something, and he began to suspect suxamethonium chloride poisoning. He obviously couldn’t test for sux, for the aforementioned ‘untraceable’ reasons, but he could test for the metabolites of sux in urine left in the kidneys—something called choline and succinic acid. He found those two metabolites in the dead patients, and thus the deaths were ruled as murders and the nurse subsequently caught when a police investigation was opened.

  This could seriously be how Callum died. It all added up, given everything else I knew about Ellen and her motivations…except for the fact that there were no needle marks on his body, according to the autopsy report Ricardo had read out to me. That was the only thing stopping me from calling the damn cops right now and shouting at them to exhume his body and open a case against Ellen before she tried to do the same shit to Liv.

  There had to be some way to inject something into a body without it being visible to a coroner. Surely.

  I tried doing a few more searches, but they all told me the same thing: no. It was impossible. During an autopsy, the doctor would check every inch of the corpse, even between the toes. Any needle marks would be found and documented.

  Shit.

  William began to squawk from his cage again. “Hello! Freckle!”

  “William, can you please—” I was about to reprimand the loud bird and tell him to be quiet when something flashed in my mind, ever so briefly. “Oh, shit…” As my voice trailed off, my gaze slowly turned back to the family photo perched on Ellen’s desk.

  The answer had been staring me in the face this entire time.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Olivia

  I sat back on my bed, stupefied. Dec had come back to our room twenty minutes ago and told me all of his latest suspicions, and I was still feeling the effects of the shock. With anyone else, I would’ve told them they were crazy, and that this was such a far-fetched theory that it should be the plot of a campy Unsolved Mysteries episode.

  But it was Dec. He was smart, and he wasn’t crazy. He cared for me, and he was desperately afraid that Mom was after me. And to be honest, it made a terrible kind of sense.

  “A freckle? You think she injected this stuff into one of Callum’s freckles?”

  Dec nodded. “He had a lot of freckles and small dark moles, right? Kinda like the ones you have on you.” He gestured toward me, and I nodded.

  “Yes. It runs in my family to be pretty freckly.”

  “Well, that’s the one spot no one would notice a needle mark on. Think about it. Some freckles and moles are so dark and have that raised, bumpy texture that there’s no way anyone could see a tiny puncture mark in them. And this stuff needs to be injected into either muscle or a vein. I’m sure your brother had a few raised freckles on his arms, same as you. Plenty of muscle in the arms. A coroner could’ve missed it.”

  I put my hand over my mouth, suddenly feeling nause
ated again. No, no, no. This couldn’t be right. But at the same time, I knew it had to be.

  “She tricked me into coming on the show,” I said in a small voice when I felt I could speak again without projectile vomiting. “She said it was because she was desperate to find a replacement contestant. But there was never anyone to replace. There was only one dropout contestant, and that was a man, who you ended up replacing for her. She intended for me to be the twelfth female contestant all along.”

  “Yes. She knew she could guilt-trip you into coming here,” Dec said with a nod.

  I nodded, my hands trembling. “She told me it could help promote my jewelry website, and she also made me feel bad that we’d barely seen each other lately. She acted like being here on this island would give us some mother-daughter bonding time.”

  “But really, she probably only wanted you here for a few weeks so she could start making you sick. Kinda hard to do that when you live across the country and never see her. So this was her opportunity for that.”

  I shook my head slowly. “There’s one thing I don’t get. We already know what she’s been slipping in my food to make me sick while I’ve been here. Triclosan. It comes up in blood tests. So why would she give me that if she doesn’t want to get caught?”

  Dec sat down and squeezed my hand. “You already know this. It’s to establish a pattern.”

  “A pattern?” I wrinkled my nose.

  He nodded. “Triclosan doesn’t kill you. It just makes you sick, like Dr. Donnelly told you. So if you were sick for a while, on and off, people would come to know you as that girl who was sick a lot. So then, six months from now—or whenever she planned to do it—when she injected you with the sux poison, which I’m pretty sure she has hidden away somewhere, it wouldn’t look that suspicious. That’s what happened with Callum, right? People were shocked that he died of heart failure so young, but at the same time, he’d been sick with nausea and headaches quite a lot in the months leading up to his death. So while it was surprising, it still seemed to make a little bit of sense. Right?”

  I nodded miserably. “He was a sick kid for a while. So yeah. That makes sense. I guess she spiked his food with something for a while too.”

  “And then he seemed to get better for a while, right? For a few weeks before he died?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was probably giving it time for the triclosan to wear out of his system. That way when she killed him with the serious untraceable poison, there’d be nothing on the tox screen results at all.”

  I put my head in my hands, my mind whirling. I didn’t want to think my mother could do something this terrible, but it all made such damn sense. She’d always been smart as hell—she didn’t become an exec producer on her own show for nothing. And when Dad died, she was furious that she got such a small portion of his fortune, even though they’d had a nasty divorce so it made sense to the rest of us. The way she saw it, she was the mother of his children, and therefore she deserved it all, whether they were divorced or not. She hadn’t mentioned it in a while now, but I remembered her tantrums clearly from the weeks after his death.

  And like Dec said, with Dad’s old job before he died (and the fact that the family owned a hospital in Monterey) she had access to this crazy chemical stuff that could act as an almost-perfect murder weapon. She could’ve waited a couple of years to kill Callum, then a few more to get rid of me. It made a sick, twisted kind of sense. After all, it was suspicious if both her kids died mysteriously at the same time, but like Dec said, if we died a few years apart, it was sad but simply unfortunate. People would probably rally around Mom, comforting her about how terribly unlucky it was that her two children died so young, so tragically. And only a few years after the death of their father, too. So sad.

  I’m sure the hundred million dollars she would have access to after we both died would be of great comfort to her as well.

  The nausea returned, and this time it was too bad to hold in. I dashed to the bathroom and leaned over the porcelain toilet, retching into the bowl. Dec followed me, stroking my back gently and murmuring soothing words. “It’s okay, baby girl. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay. I won’t let her touch you.”

  “I…I can’t believe it,” I choked out between sobbing and retching. “She did all this, planned all this. Just for money. I don’t want to believe it, but it all makes sense!”

  “Some people will do anything for a huge chunk of change. Look at me. I agreed to legally marry a woman just to get enough for Amelia’s treatment program.”

  I wiped my mouth. “That’s different. You did it for your family. My Mom is probably trying to kill her entire family, for her own gain. See the difference?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. It’s fucked up.”

  “Even just this morning, when she said she wanted us to start spending more time together….I bet it was only so she could keep making me sick. Then eventually kill me. After you’d legally adopted me, of course. Jesus…it’s so messed up.”

  Dec shook his head, cold fury etched into his features. “I can’t believe she thought I’d do that. As if I’m that fucking stupid that I wouldn’t see she was up to something dodgy when she asked me to adopt you.”

  “Well, you might not have realized how dodgy it all was if you and I hadn’t gotten so close,” I said, before spitting some bile into the toilet bowl. I raised my head again. “That’s her downfall. Us. She had no idea we’d get together and share all our fears and secrets. No idea the stupid freaking Love Randomizer would put us together.”

  “I’m fucking glad it did.”

  I looked up at him, right into his eyes. “Dec, we need to end this. We need to prove it once and for all. We’ve figured it all out. At least we think we have. But we need more solid evidence.”

  Dec gave me a thin smile and rubbed my back. “Don’t worry, princess. I’m already on it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Dec

  That bitch was going down.

  Going. The. Fuck. Down.

  Violence against women was a terrible thing, but holy shit, I couldn’t stop myself from wishing someone would burst in here and strangle Ellen right now as she stood before us in her office.

  “What did you just say, Dec?” she asked, face still drawn into a mask of composure.

  “I said our deal is off. Our sham marriage is off.”

  She narrowed her eyes, almost imperceptibly. “You can’t do that.”

  “I can do whatever the fuck I want. And we haven’t gone public yet, so really, it’s no skin off your nose. No embarrassment for you.”

  She smiled thinly. “If you say our deal is off, then our marriage gets annulled. Immediately. Our contract is then voided, and your family gets nothing. Are you really willing to do that to darling little Amelia?”

  She looked like she was about to laugh, and it took every bit of resolve I had to not pick something up and throw it in her damn smarmy face.

  “Amelia will be fine. I have enough money to keep her treatment payments going for another couple of months. That should be enough time for me to properly receive my share of the money I’ll get from winning this shit-show.”

  Ellen’s brows shot up, and this time she did laugh. “Oh! That’s your plan? You think you’re gonna win Wed At First Sight? My show?”

  “Yeah. I am. And Liv’s on my side in all this,” I said, slinging an arm around Liv’s shoulder. “She’s gonna help me do it. She’s already helped make us the most popular couple so far, after all.”

  “Oh, and it was my idea for us to win, Mom,” Liv added.

  Ellen had the good grace to actually look surprised, although that was difficult with all the Botox in her forehead. She took a faltering step back, the first sign that she’d realized her little house of cards was about to topple. “What?”

  “Dec and I are together, Mom,” Liv said smoothly.

  “What?”

  She was beginning to sound as parrot-like as William. I loved that damn bird
. If it wasn’t for him constantly shouting the word ‘freckle’ I never would’ve realized what Ellen likely did to her own son.

  “We’re in a relationship. We haven’t just been faking it for the show. We’re really together.”

  “No. No, you can’t do this,” Ellen said, wildly shaking her head. “Liv, you can’t possibly betray me like this. If you two win, I risk losing the show and my job. We’ve been through this already! Someone from the crew could get pissed if you get the prize money and they could tell the network heads who you really are! Then I’m screwed for putting you on the show in the first place.”

  “Oh, Mommy dearest, you’re about to lose a lot more than your job,” Liv said sweetly. “So I wouldn’t even worry what the network thinks of you at this point.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we figured out your plan,” I cut in smoothly. “We figured out everything.”

  “What plan?”

  “I found the adoption contracts in your drawer.”

  “And I found out that you tricked me into coming here,” Liv chimed in.

  To her credit, Ellen mostly kept her cool. “I can explain all that,” she said with a flustered wave of her hand. “Dec, I thought you legally adopting Liv would make our fake marriage more convincing to others. And Liv, yes, I did trick you into coming here. I wanted to spend more time with you. That’s all.”

  “Wanted to spend more time dropping hand sanitizer into my food and drinks, you mean?” Liv asked, her face etched with fury. “Dec found that, too. In your third drawer with the adoption papers. And Dr. Donnelly ran tests on me last week which showed that I have a very high level of something in my system which only comes in…you guessed it. Hand sanitizer.”

  Ellen’s mask was beginning to slip, but she managed to keep a grip despite her rapidly-whitening skin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I…I’ve never even used hand sanitizer. One of my staff members must’ve just left it in my drawer by accident.”